In the bass trombone solo the competitors were J. Brown (Mount Morgan Band) E. Boreham (Rockhampton Foresters), and W. Selby (Brisbane Excelsior).At the conclusion of the playing, the adjudicator, Mr. Albert Wade, of Wanganui, New Zealand, said that he could not possibly award a prize. He was sorry that he could not pass their playing. Had he done so the winner might have gone away under the impression that he was the champion of Queensland.

Xlent !! who/when/where was this then..................hehehehehehehehehee!!

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Erm... no insult intended, but did you actually read the post? Like the bit where it starts with the name and location of the publication, the date of the extract, and goes on to list the names of everyone involved....

Ah.... erm yes that could be the case. My apologies. Didn't think of that....

I can't remember exactly where it was, on the night, or which adjudicator cut their performance short - but it was 'Three Lions Brass,' a scratch band who were somewhat reincarnated this year as the notorious 'Hula Hores' who's antics ended up with a thread all of their own on this very forum.....

Was researching an answer to an item of feedback submitted to brassbandresults.co.uk, asking about a contest at Nambour, QLD in 1929. The website I linked to in my first post is amazing - a truly gigantic archive of scanned and electronically translated (thus searchable) old Australian newspaper articles, stuffed full of all sorts of interestingness. Do we have anything equivalent in the UK? I'm not aware of it if so.

Was researching an answer to an item of feedback submitted to brassbandresults.co.uk, asking about a contest at Nambour, QLD in 1929. The website I linked to in my first post is amazing - a truly gigantic archive of scanned and electronically translated (thus searchable) old Australian newspaper articles, stuffed full of all sorts of interestingness. Do we have anything equivalent in the UK? I'm not aware of it if so.

Alas, keeping complete archives with a view to history is a relatively modern thing - and even now it's failing. Libraries are shredding volumes of work hand over fist because they simply don't have the resources to keep them on file, and a lot of people are concerned that some major works will be unthinkingly lost to history because everyone's collectively thinking "surely someone else will have kept a copy of that?"

Our own dear BBC destroyed huge quantities of film, VT and suchlike as recently as the 70s and 80s, leading to 'lost' episodes of favourites such as dad's army and doctor who, where the scripts have survived and the remaining actors remember shooting the episodes, but all the known recordings have been destroyed.

Alas, this is the case throughout almost our entire history. I suppose the epitome is Livy's history of rome, which documented just about everything from the foundation of the mpire to it's date of publication around 9AD. 142 volumes long in it's original form, of which about 35 volumes - some incomplete - actually survive. The main thing is, theose which do survive are so brilliantly informative that between them they form the foundation of almost everything we know about the early years of the Roman empire. The reason we only have about a quarter of it? Because it took about 1500 years before anyone started to realise that yknow, this might well be a good thing to actually hang on to a copy of....

Well, that's rather more eloquent than the whit friday adjudicator who actually came out of his caravan and told a band to 'stop playing and clear off.'

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I remember at the old Hudds. Association Contest years ago Pete Kitson coming out of the box after a contest of such paracetmol searching badness that he felt compelled to tell the audience that it wasnt a case of awarding a winner but finding the least worst band...

I remember at the old Hudds. Association Contest years ago Pete Kitson coming out of the box after a contest of such paracetmol searching badness that he felt compelled to tell the audience that it wasnt a case of awarding a winner but finding the least worst band...

JR

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There's often something to be learned from such incidents.

I remember at co-op (long after you'd moved on, JR) being adjudicated by an ABBA colleague of yours, Stan Lippeatt, and he placed us second to last and handed the 1st prize to a band a full section below us.

Normally a band like ours would have steam coming out of their ears at that - particularly after we'd had two wins on the spin at the same contest in the previous two years! But the reasons Stan laid down simply could not be argued with.

He said that the two bands he'd placed last and second last had chosen pieces that they not only couldn't play, but couldn't even nearly play. He added that whilst the ambition to stretch the band should be applauded, being able to actually get from end of end of the piece with a reasonable show of competency was the most basic requirement for entering a band contest, and especially at an own-choice contest there was no excuse for such poor showings. (I didn't hear the band placed last, but ours was a shocker, I'll admit!) For these reasons he thought that those who had chosen more within the scope of their abilities should be graded higher.

To this day, it's the best and fairest reason I've ever had for such a lowly placing. Oddly, despite finishing nowhere and losing all the silverware we'd won the year before, I went home satisfied we'd got the result we deserved.